Lighten Up

Raise your disposition from crappy to happy in 5 simple steps

May 22, 2003

You're eating the world's best pizza. With Heidi Klum. She's across the table, and she's looking particularly lovely in a little red tank top. She wants to play with your pepperoni tonight. Then, in the morning, you'll play Powerball and win $100 million.

You're totally happy, right?

Right—for a couple of months. After that, you'll go back to being your same old self. Studies show that people who are showered with fortune soon revert to the baseline of their genetic temperament, which may range from partly sunny to mostly cloudy with a 50 percent chance of rain on their own parade. Lottery winners, for example, aren't wildly happier than the rest of us—they're only a tiny bit happier.

Knowing that, however, won't stop the rest of us from the all-American pursuit of happiness. "Everybody wants to be a little happier than he is," says Ed Diener, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Illinois. And that would be okay if we knew what the hell we were doing. But we don't. "People are not very good at predicting the kinds of things that will make them happy," Diener says.

Which is why he and a few hundred other psychologists have started a little movement, with its own annual convention, called Positive Psychology. This sounds like a joke—most of psychology is hyperfocused on what makes people crazy and miserable. But Diener and his maverick band are trying to understand what they call subjective well-being. They have taken that big, squishy feeling called happiness and are dissecting it.

Diener himself has been studying happiness for the past 20 years. So he knows his stuff. He knows what doesn't make people happy. For instance, money won't do it—not unless you're living in a cardboard box. Good looks? Maybe a little. Bodily pleasures? Hmmm . . . you're getting warmer.

Diener's no hair shirt; "I don't think pleasure is a bad thing," he says. But it's overrated. Even if you do discover the world's best pizza, your senses are quickly sated, and the duration of the bliss is cut short by what psychologists call habituation. How about sex with a supermodel? Thrilling at first, but before long you find yourself on the "hedonic treadmill," and your mood adapts to the good life. To repeat this thrill, you'll have to start sleeping with Naomi Watts on the side.

So where, then, does happiness lie? Try friends. Family. Work. Goals. Values. Some happiness researchers believe that a winning combination of thought, action, and attitude will put us on an "upward spiral" toward bliss. All we have to do is train our brains to be happier. Does that really work? Diener himself is reserving judgment—he wants to see more studies done. But he's confident that "happiness is not solely genetic," he says. Accordingly, there are some steps people can take to ensure that they're as happy as they can be.

Diener's advice: Don't wait until you win the lottery. Right this instant, decide to bring a little more sunshine into your days and ways. Here are five steps on the stairway to seventh heaven.

CHANGE YOUR ACTIONS

Ken Sheldon, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Missouri, has conducted four surveys of more than 1,000 college students; he measured their happiness over the course of a semester. The surveys provide dramatic evidence that a change of circumstances—such as moving to California, buying a new toy, or switching roommates—yields a happiness that is only fleeting. "Changing circumstances will give you a short-lived boost," he says, "but then you're right back where you started." On the other hand, he found that the students who took on new activities--they switched majors, joined a new club, or began a new exercise program—gained lasting joy.

DO THAT THING YOU DO

What do you do well? Whatever it is—snowboarding, building a deck, or accounting—you've probably felt the sensation of total involvement and pure mastery, when your training and skill are perfectly matched to the challenge, and time stops. Oddly, nobody ever came up with a good word for this peak experience until 1990, when a Czech-born psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, wrote a bestseller entitled Flow. These are some of the best moments in life; they happen "when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." At the time, you may not say to yourself, Ha-cha-cha, I'm so happy. You're too full of seriousness and purpose. But afterward, when you look back, you say, That was excellent. That's the happiness that follows flow.

SET A GOAL—AND GET GOING

There's a lot to be said for knocking something big off your to-do list. Yet most of us are too easily frustrated by our lack of progress in the short term, so we miss out on achievements that require long-term commitment, according to David Myers, Ph.D., a psychologist at Hope College and author of The Pursuit of Happiness. "Although we often overestimate how much we will accomplish in any given day, we generally underestimate how much we can accomplish in a year," he says.

BE GRATEFUL

Psychologists Michael McCullough, Ph.D., and Robert Emmons, Ph.D., have done the pioneering work on gratitude. In a nutshell, they've found that being grateful makes people happier. They asked volunteers to keep daily diaries for 2 weeks; one group recorded daily hassles, another group jotted down events, and a third, the "gratitude group," listed up to five things they were thankful for each day. By the end, people in the gratitude group were so much happier, their spouses noticed a change. McCullough says that people who frequently experience gratitude are also more optimistic and helpful, and have more determination and energy. "Every good trait you'd want for yourself or for other people seems to go along with being grateful," says McCullough, a psychologist at the University of Miami.

MAKE TIME FOR FRIENDS

Not the television re-run—your real friends. Recently, Diener and Martin Seligman, Ph.D. (author of Authentic Happiness), conducted a study of 222 Illinois college students. Then they zeroed in on the 22 happiest. "Every one of the happiest people had good social relationships," says Diener. They had at least two of these three associations: a romantic partner, a group of friends, and strong family ties. You now have Official Permission to tell your romantic partner that you're going out with the guys tonight.

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